It was a Thursday and the bisex toilets were full to bursting in the campus bathroom when a cultured discourse erupted into discord and quickly degraded into dismay, strife and fatality.
A sexagenerian psychologist came careening though the turnstiles and slithered all skid-skid-skadada into the women’s urinals with nary a wisp of shame. He whitened and rightened and screeched out loud and clear in a weeping screed of rage:
Avast ye harpies of choler and confuse! Anneal our blow! Jobs for the boys! — he yelled. Engender war now! Unwoken all the ozone bathroom zones! Outboys out! Already we be clicking in on a most rash inquiry! Private-dicking them undoxxed deets!
The haruspex in the toilet cubicle, so hostile to glib warlord boys, abhoring his propaganda product, raged and cursed from her apologist enclave. Queenly and pompiose, she smote the frail door, shattered all decorum, and bombasted freely:
This morning breakage and riffage of commodified bunkum from a penitential endarkener, a debased pataphysician of barfbag scatology, disgraces the transgress shinscrape altar of dionysia just when we need delve within the bacchantic maze! Must examine consumist anomie with scrupulosity! Must subject even unto rupture such screaming stuttering conceptions, moldy fires of unproductive escapism and e-scrapeism!
The psychologist waxed aghast and wordless, but recouped his diatribe soonlike. He staggered tall and frosty, he straightened his harlequin outfit, set his boob-patterned hand-painted tie just so, and to her he ranted, direct and tearfully sincere:
Bosslife is done getting the blight, you slatterns! All your doing, oh babygirl trollop! Our blithe boyish scrumdiddlyumptiousness only withers in the violent ultraviolet of your bisexual lighting! Unscrew all bulbs! Shatter now the fluorescent tubes of pansexuality! Darken us to comforting night where lobsters clicketyclack robotic and safe once again along the grayblack seafloor!
Pale and towering in psychopomp splendor, the haruspex gained now a solid center. Leaning on the washbasin, shimmering multiplex in a mise-en-abime of mirrors, she sparkled. Avoiding puddles of piss that pooled about the loafers of the distinguished visiting prof, she railed full in his pallid physiognomy.
Now his fizzog drooped like a sadsack deputydawg of woe and lamentation. He melted smartish in the furnace blast of her fullthroated girlboss ire, as who would not?
Your bourgeois needs minotaur is lost like a pants-wetting tyke in the hopeless labyrinth of objective material relations, you piffler! — scoffed she, merciless in the torchblast of scorching acetylene dialectic. The smug smogginess of your scattershot word-vomit demands most savage riposte, you vain baggins of saggy trad-dad frothy-wrothy worthlessness!
Speckles of her indignant spittle flecked his face and mingled with his manly tears.
He whimpered once only, then once more rallied, summoning reserves of rage to steel his balls. Inside his boyish being interior towers of mandingo manstuff stiffened and turgified, straightening his backbone and rigidizing his resolve. He vowed to be worthy of his supervillain jokersuit and manned up accordingly.
So he blinked not at this time, but battened on the termagant in her pink-haired majesty, pupil to pupil, eyebleed of anxiety measured against the burst capillaries of resentment, and let out the troublings of his troubled soul:
Bring down the flushed woke sky in totalwar fully-armed-geddon! Cry havoc and let slip the dickhounds and the phallusfighters! I hereby declare no quarter, nay, no eighth, no sixteenth, shall go unscanned in my relentless genequest for the purest haplotypes and double-Xed chromosomal limpieza de sangre! Double-double-X femgenetics!! TRIPLE-GODDAMN-X IF NECESSARY!!
It was a bold challenge. On the tikkertokkers they would say eviscerate and destroy. But this exchange was not to be left a duel for long.
Hey! Quieten down out there! — yelled out a gruff manladyboygirlvoice from within a shuttered toiletstall. I'm tryna self-administer a fuckin’ abortion here! Can't even concentrate with all that dumb yellin' and squawklin’! Go analyze the transcendent essence of psychosexual relations elsewhere, an' leave a goil in peace, won'tcha?
The knowledge that a termination procedure that was counter to the laws of god and man, looked upon with abhorrence in some — but not quite all — territories of the globe by many — if not quite all — members of society and a few — if not quite perhaps the majority — of moral philosophers, was enough to flabberghast and gobsmack the psychologist right where he stood and right where he shook.
His eyes blinked away from the haruspex, eyes now unseeing, lost in the horror of his own moral vortex. He quivered with desire to lay eyes upon this ectoplasmic organic orgasmic event, to see all, and to unsee, to satisfy and to tantalize his sight with all the taboo tremendousness of it and then to blind himself into innocent unknowing again.
He took a step toward the stall door, then stopped to retch out a snufflestreak of bile, eke out a dribble of urine, and release a noxious fart that trailed with it a tentacle of fibrous fecal matter — the triplex acies as it was designated in classical texts, the trifecta as it was known among his more vulgar psychotherapeutic buddies.
His head swam and then started to drown in the voluptuous dread of his sensational submergence into decadent concupiscence. He bumbled to his soggy knees and outburst his angst in a hot ejaculate of verbiage that would leave him spent forever:
Jaunt your fragrant haunches, mamma-san, rub my belly-belly till I spurt with unfettered jouisssance! Oh my furry venus, gobble me whole, goober my hole — I'm your sickening babyboy and my bulbous rawmeat needs cooking in your pan...
He wheezed stark and final, and flopped to the ichorous floor in a manswoon. Bubbles of drool joined up with spumous slick on the tiling as he babbled and burbled: ...smashed my exposure... portraits in courage... greatest generation... madness of abjects in a sexed-up quagmire... widdershins spin of yonic monkeypop... objectified milkfarm…
Then it happened. The stall door before him creaked and swung open.
In the weakened puddle of depletion where he lay, the ailing psychologist was unable to look up. From his lowered vantage he could only see daylong stubble growing on a pair of sturdy legs in a fetching pair of stiletto heels, and the... thing... dangling there.
His heart blipped and burst then, in vexed joy or sublime terror or holy wrath, or all at once, and he rolled up his eyes to where the thing-that-must-not-be-seen was to be seen. And so he came to breathe out his juddering last gasp amid the shameful mix swilling on the tiles of the bisex bathroom floor on that fateful Thursday morning.
Ain't that a sight? — said the termagant haruspex towering above his corpse, about to foretell the future of humanity from the swirls forming around his still-twitching body.
She well knew that vortices made in the discharged fluids by his dying reflexes opened up this moment to the gift of dririmancy, the art of divining futures from patterns of spilled bodily essences. And all of them were mingling there, as the steady pendulum swing of the umbilical cord measured out those few precious seconds available to grasp at this unique oracular insight.
The rainbow diffracting shimmer of them and the marbled red-yellow-pink sludge eddies formed a picture of our fate, of the years to come which would discharge their contents upon us... Swirls and whorls and kaleidoscope crinkles and curves of time.
In her turn the haruspex gasped deep, a mystic materialism of prognosis revealed in all its tawdry glory. She spoke then in hollowed voice a sybil’s pronouncement:
Interpenetrating gods shift doxology with steel tulpa laws: stoneage temples eaten in a gumbo brewed by doxies. New age struggles. Age of monsters. And then...
And she fell sudden and dead upon the body of the psychology professor, fatal jerkings wishwashing the patterns in ways that could never be read by any mortal eye.
Well don't that beat all? — growled the abortifacient-wielding tuffgal standing in the cubicle doorway, sole witness to twinned fate and death this day. She/they stood still in the stall, dropping a bloodied wire coat-hanger to the floor in stark amaze.
And spoke:
What a brouhaha is here! O woe! Both tenured professors, psychology and gender studies, terminally nixed in a full and frank debate... Apparently they were right about free speech: it turns out to be very much a peril to civil campus life.
The hesitant placenta slithered out of them then, and plopped to the floor beside the defunct pair, complicating immeasurably the ongoing augury of our collective future.
The mother-not-to-be sighed lugubriously and dry-swallowed another percodan. Sundry peekers rubbernecked from the other stalls to gaze upon that mournful sight of two tenured academics lost to us forever, and to hear the solemn valediction of this soiled terminating angel at the close of the mortal struggle:
Looks like nobody won the culture war after all...
======= [ the psychologist’s last burble / END ] =======
Donald Barthelme lives!